[lug] ps2pdf and correct/nice fonts

[Ryan Kirkpatrick]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2000, Andrew Diederich wrote:

> I just gave ps2pdf a quick try, but I think it converted everything to
> type-1 fonts, or some other nasty variety.  Any idea how I can get a good
> looking pdf doc from postscript/dvi/other?  I'm currently running SuSE
> 6.1/6.3, if that helps.

	If you are using lyx to generate the postscript files you are
running through ps2pdf, you need to set the fonts used by lyx to 'times'.
The default setting is 'default' :), some sort of roman font that PDF's do
not support by default, and thus the font ends up bitmapped (icky).
	To do this, from Lyx, with a document open, choose
Layout->Document->Fonts->Times. Then generate a new postscript file and
run it through ps2pdf. The main body text will be in a "built-in" PDF
font, and look nice when printed and viewed under Acrobat. Equations
though are still in roman font, so look less then perfect on screen, but
fine when printed.
	Also, make sure you are using Acrobat Reader 4.0 on the Windows
boxes, 3.0 doesn't handle ps2pdf PDFs very well at all, while 4.0 does an
excellent job. 
	This trick is probably true of any postscript file you want to
convert to PDF. Just get the fonts used, or a majority of the fonts used,
into something that matches the PDF builtin fonts.
	This is the way I have been doing it to print out large lab
reports (25-40 pages) written in Lyx (w/lots of pictures) on the school's
lasers which one can only print to from WinNT (using Acroread 4.0 of
course).

	PS. pdflatex does NOT handle eps or postscript figures that are a
part of a latex document. It just ignores them, or did the last time I
used it. 

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|   "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."                    |
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|   Ryan Kirkpatrick  |  Boulder, Colorado  |  http://www.rkirkpat.net/   |
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